"I don't know [why I was chosen]. I've no idea," she says, wheezing with laughter. "There was no one else? They made a mistake, a terrible mistake."

Self-effacing humility aside, Blunt says she took on the job in part because of the controversy surrounding it. YSL's Opium came under fire in 2000 for a billboard featuring a naked Sophie Dahl, which invited 730 complaints to Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and a subsequent ban.

Then this past February, another Opium ad got in trouble for featuring a woman dancing in a style that, ostensibly, simulated drug use. Deemed "irresponsible and unacceptable for broadcast" by Britain's ASA, the ad was banned.

"There's such an aura of scandal around this perfume that I was quite attached to the idea of doing it from the word go," Blunt told the Telegraph. "I'd been asked to do a couple of things but none were as classy as this. And I got to work with a leopard. "

And it was because of the leopard that Blunt appears in the ad wearing a classic le smoking (tuxedo) instead of a dress. "The leopard trainer says, 'If you have flowing fabric around the leopard the leopard will go crazy,' " Blunt told the Telegraph, "So I said yes to the tux. "